Brain Recording

[Kitsune]

I finished a little while ago a set of sci-fi novels which has the three ideas of regeneration, clone bodies, and brain recordings.

It is these second two which I am thinking about. Assume that we could record the patterns of a brain and re-implant them in a clone body (of say 18 years old.)

How would they effect religion and culture in general? Assume that we find a solution to the ability of the planet to support life (Cheap FTL is the most likely solution)

[B5B7]

Context is important. Usually when a society is portrayed with those particular techs they are advanced in many other ways eg Peter Hamilton's Intersolar Commonwealth.
You seem to be asking the question in relation to our society - where does the tech come from, and how is it introduced?

I will try to answer anyway. This would be a big problem for the major religions, with their concept of the soul (of course, the Star Trek transporter raises same question).
There are ethical problems about growing the clones needed.
The first cultural problem is the perpetual one of who has access to it - just the rich or anyone or something in-between?

A major aspect is that death is not so significant - the provision of a new life is better than the nebulous afterlife promises of religion, so that is another reason religion would decline. This also depends on exactly how your recording tech works - do you have to go to a recording parlor each year to update your recording, or as in the Hamilton books do you have an implanted device that continually records you and that for safety you regularly have downloaded at a secure location?

[Kitsune]

That is the book series....Most of the others which I read use anti-aging drugs.
The only other ones I know which use regeneration are Elizabeth Moon's books

[General Zod]

I finished a little while ago a set of sci-fi novels which has the three ideas of regeneration, clone bodies, and brain recordings.

It is these second two which I am thinking about. Assume that we could record the patterns of a brain and re-implant them in a clone body (of say 18 years old.)

How would they effect religion and culture in general? Assume that we find a solution to the ability of the planet to support life (Cheap FTL is the most likely solution)

I take it you've never seen the new Battlestar Galactica series?

[Akkleptos]

That posibility has been explored in action/sci-fi films such as The Sixth Day (2000).
And also (without the cloning, but rather substracting the body of a healthy man about to die via time travel to upload the "mind" of a dead rich man) in Freejack (1992) featuring Mick Jagger as the relentless "bonehunter" Vacendak! Fun fact: the action takes place -don't laugh!- in 2009!
This movies also deal with society's reaction to these "life extension" via cloning and uploading of minds (The Sixth Day: forbidden by law) and uploading of minds into a healthy body brought back from the past (Freejack: accepted by all, since people used were to die anyway when they took them, thus the nickname "bones").

Favourite quote: "Look at these people, Alex! They've lived half their lives with NO OZONE LAYER!"

What? Nobody saw movies before 2001?

True cinema jewels!

EDITED: Included more info.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I immediately thought of John Varley's Eight Worlds stories.

[Khaat]

I immediately thought of the 1980's Steve Jackson Games Car Wars, with "Gold Cross" cloning and memory recordings (originally direct donor-to-clone good for up to a month, then storable: mechanical memory storgage devices: MMSDs). I think they only gave it cursory examination as to the legal ramifications in later RPG-related supplements (GURPS) or articles. If they ever considered the religious angle, I don't remember it.

The common theme in that genre is that an imprinted clone is a continuation of the deceased, an unimprinted clone cannot survive, and it's fairly expensive. There was a Pyramid article on "cloning and the law". http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=473

Even older are the somewhat related "organ banks" of Larry Niven' Known Universe stories (pre-rejuvenation tech), where jay-walking could get you chopped up for parts.... Not quite "is my clone really me?" questions, though.

[Samuel]

I finished a little while ago a set of sci-fi novels which has the three ideas of regeneration, clone bodies, and brain recordings.

It is these second two which I am thinking about. Assume that we could record the patterns of a brain and re-implant them in a clone body (of say 18 years old.)

How would they effect religion and culture in general? Assume that we find a solution to the ability of the planet to support life (Cheap FTL is the most likely solution)

You're still dead- it is just a copy.

Life goes on, but we can have wars like Planetside Except non-sucky.

[Akkleptos]

You're still dead- it is just a copy.

The heart of the matter, as far as YOU are concerned. In any case, your mind dies at one point or another. Having it copied can be just as good for the people around you, but as for you, GAME OVER, MAN, GAME OVER!

Not entirely unlike a transporter from ST. People didn't seem to mind it a whole lot there.

[Starglider]

The heart of the matter, as far as YOU are concerned. In any case, your mind dies at one point or another. Having it copied can be just as good for the people around you, but as for you, GAME OVER, MAN, GAME OVER!

This 'continuity flaw' nonsense is effectively superstition, along with a whole raft of other broken human intuitive notions about how minds and selves work. I guarantee that if you asked a sapient AI (constructed without human evolutionary peculiarities) the same question, it would say 'the copy of me is also me'.

[Akkleptos]

This 'continuity flaw' nonsense is effectively superstition, along with a whole raft of other broken human intuitive notions about how minds and selves work. I guarantee that if you asked a sapient AI (constructed without human evolutionary peculiarities) the same question, it would say 'the copy of me is also me'.

Let's hear you say that just before stepping onto an ST Transporter.

[Starglider]

Let's hear you say that just before stepping onto an ST Transporter.

I would. Trek transporters are apparently quite in excess of reasonable requirements for being a contiguous copy; they are accurate to a 'quantum resolution' (gross neuron state is quite adequate, but perhaps the Federation has some Penrose-style quantum consciousness cultists) and seem to maintain some sort of consciousness even during beaming (characters talking while in transport in Trek 2, Barclay seeing and interacting with other-space beings in 'Realm of Fear').

[Akkleptos]

Let's hear you say that just before stepping onto an ST Transporter.

I would. Trek transporters are apparently quite in excess of reasonable requirements for being a contiguous copy; they are accurate to a 'quantum resolution' (gross neuron state is quite adequate, but perhaps the Federation has some Penrose-style quantum consciousness cultists) and seem to maintain some sort of consciousness even during beaming (characters talking while in transport in Trek 2, Barclay seeing and interacting with other-space beings in 'Realm of Fear').

I see your point. I wanted to expand it further in the original reply, but the system wouldn't let me.

My point is this: were you to be trasporter-cloned... would you agree to be killed by a shot to the head (for whatever reasons), since there would be another you available, anyway? You, your physical human body, killed, all your consciousness stopping at once and vanishing into the void (in other words, killing you) would be okay if there were a clone with a fully functional copy of your working mind? In any case, you do get killed. The fact that there are clones of you who might think they're you doesn't matter. You die.

[Starglider]

My point is this: were you to be trasporter-cloned... would you agree to be killed by a shot to the head (for whatever reasons), since there would be another you available, anyway?

I wouldn't do it on a whim, but I would if there was some compelling reason to. Destroying a brain mere milliseconds after making a perfect copy is pretty irrelevant; that isn't even long enough for a single neuron firing, never mind any kind of brain-global events or actual thought. However if you wait for seconds or minutes, then some thought does take place and the two copies will diverge slightly (unless you are in an extremely contrived lab situation).

Now technically, killing one copy is mentally equivalent to suffering total amnesia of the period between the duplication and brain death (it gets more complicated if you wait months, long enough for significant personality divergence, but that isn't relevant over a timespan of hours). Again, that's what a rational AI would say. However I am still human and would be moderately freaked out by this, plus there are some weird and unpleasant possibilities related to many-worlds that we can't rule out with our current understanding of physics, so it's not something I'd indulge in if I could avoid it.

In any case, you do get killed. The fact that there are clones of you who might think they're you doesn't matter. You die.

A body containing a me-like mind dies. Sensible definitions of 'youness' are a similarity measurement not a boolean property, and something like a transporter copy or a flash-upload are so similar they're well beneath the noise threshold inherent in a humanlike mind. If the clone is a few minutes old, that's close but distinct, and while it's probably ok I can't say that it wouldn't bother me a bit. Restoring from a backup days or months old is a rather more serious and regrettable case of amnesia regardless of continuity issues. Restoring from one years old is genuinely a different person (generally speaking), but probably still better than the alternative, in that you wouldn't normally want to throw away everything that person was.

[Starglider]

Oh an addendum to this if you're going to continue arguing.

I've had this debate a lot of times. Generally, people arguing for the conventional one-body one-person view can't imagine how I could possibly believe this. The think it must be some kind of philosophical self-delusion, because for them (for most people actually) it is self-evident that one body == one person. Thus they treat this as an unquestionable axiom and tend to just repeat 'but... you... die...' over and over (with increasing levels of boldness and italics ).

Very little in life is really 'self-evident', certainly not the answers to questions about processes as complex and sophisticated as the human brain. The answer seems 'self-evident' for the same reason that 'heavy objects fall faster' seems self-evident; it's one of the 'intuitive reasoning' principles hardwired into the brain. Unfortunately while Newtonian mechanics has been a mature discipline for long enough that it's quite easy to prove that heavy objects only seem to fall faster due to air resistance, cognitive science is very very young, and people react to the conclusions about as well as Victorians would to the principles of quantum physics.

Anyway, if you are treating this as an axiom, seriously ask yourself why.

[Akkleptos]

My point is this: were you to be trasporter-cloned... would you agree to be killed by a shot to the head (for whatever reasons), since there would be another you available, anyway?

I wouldn't do it on a whim, but I would if there was some compelling reason to. Destroying a brain mere milliseconds after making a perfect copy is pretty irrelevant; that isn't even long enough for a single neuron firing, never mind any kind of brain-global events or actual thought. However if you wait for seconds or minutes, then some thought does take place and the two copies will diverge slightly (unless you are in an extremely contrived lab situation).

Now technically, killing one copy is mentally equivalent to suffering total amnesia of the period between the duplication and brain death (it gets more complicated if you wait months, long enough for significant personality divergence, but that isn't relevant over a timespan of hours). Again, that's what a rational AI would say. However I am still human and would be moderately freaked out by this, plus there are some weird and unpleasant possibilities related to many-worlds that we can't rule out with our current understanding of physics, so it's not something I'd indulge in if I could avoid it.

In any case, you do get killed. The fact that there are clones of you who might think they're you doesn't matter. You die.

A body containing a me-like mind dies. Sensible definitions of 'youness' are a similarity measurement not a boolean property, and something like a transporter copy or a flash-upload are so similar they're well beneath the noise threshold inherent in a humanlike mind. If the clone is a few minutes old, that's close but distinct, and while it's probably ok I can't say that it wouldn't bother me a bit. Restoring from a backup days or months old is a rather more serious and regrettable case of amnesia regardless of continuity issues. Restoring from one years old is genuinely a different person (generally speaking), but probably still better than the alternative, in that you wouldn't normally want to throw away everything that person was.

With all due respect, it all seems pretty plausible, except for the part when YOU die. For everyone around you, your perfect clones might still be you -split-second amnesia and all- but the fact remains the same... YOU don't get to live what your clones live, because you are dead. Imagine you're being "syncrobated" (mind-downloaded) and cloned right now, while reading this post. A second later, you're killed. For YOU, it's all over. Your clones, well, that's a whole other basket. YOU die.

I've had this debate a lot of times. Generally, people arguing for the conventional one-body one-person view can't imagine how I could possibly believe this. The think it must be some kind of philosophical self-delusion, because for them (for most people actually) it is self-evident that one body == one person. Thus they treat this as an unquestionable axiom and tend to just repeat 'but... you... die...' over and over (with increasing levels of boldness and italics ).

Yeah, it tends to get ridiculously repetitive. Okay, take the example I just mentioned, and exclude the part where you're cloned and have your mind uploaded to the clones. Isn't it clear that [subscript]you die[/subscript]?

[Starglider]

A second later, you're killed. For YOU, it's all over. Your clones, well, that's a whole other basket. YOU die.

What's your current position now? Are you accepting flash-cloning as long as the original is frozen completely or the transfer is physically instantaneous (i.e. you've given up on your attachment to your current set of atoms)? Are you accepting a copy/destroy interval of a few milliseconds? Obviously you're not accepting intervals of seconds and above yet.

As for YOU IN CAPITALS, treat this as a hypothesis. Since objectively the clones are identical to the original (and for short intervals, perform identically in virtually all tests), I'd say that you need to prove why killing one clone is as inherently horrible as killing all of them (which seem to be what you're implying).

Okay, take the example I just mentioned, and exclude the part where you're cloned and have your mind uploaded to the clones. Isn't it clear that [subscript]you die[/subscript]?

Yes, because there are now zero copies of me in the universe; even the 'generalised me' is no longer experiencing anything, and never will again.

Well probably. If many-worlds is correct (and any kind of physical infinity will probably do it, not just the branching timelines resolution to quantum uncertainty) then you can't actually kill anyone anyway in either the subjective or truly global sense. You can just confine most future versions of you into a class of universes where they aren't present. But that's a whole other debate.

[Acidburns]

Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon is a great novel that explores the impacts of this kind of technology. In the novel human minds are downloadable into little memory "stacks" that are implanted in the spine. Bodies are referred to as sleeves and if I remember correctly a crime is only murder if they destroy the person's stack. Otherwise it is treated as a new category of crime which is sleeve damage. Faster than light travel is performed using FTL communications to send a person's digitally stored brain where they are given a new body on arrival.

Catholics still believe that when they die their soul goes to heaven and thus will not be passed onto any new body, they all sign a legal document not to have their stack re-sleeved. They become easier targets for murder because they will not be around to testify. This becomes key to the novels plot when there is a resolution to temporarily re-sleeve a catholic woman to testify in a murder trial.

From what I remember in the novel they are able to run stacks in computer simulated environments without sleeving them.

[Akkleptos]

What's your current position now? Are you accepting flash-cloning as long as the original is frozen completely or the transfer is physically instantaneous (i.e. you've given up on your attachment to your current set of atoms)? Are you accepting a copy/destroy interval of a few milliseconds? Obviously you're not accepting intervals of seconds and above yet.

I'm glad you asked. My position is the same as always. I'm not accepting any of the mentioned methods as being true continuations of your life. It's just that you get an identical twin who happens to think he's you. You die (sorry, nth time it's been said, I know). As Samuel put it so succintly:

You're still dead- it is just a copy.

Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon is a great novel that explores the impacts of this kind of technology. In the novel human minds are downloadable into little memory "stacks" that are implanted in the spine. Bodies are referred to as sleeves and if I remember correctly a crime is only murder if they destroy the person's stack. Otherwise it is treated as a new category of crime which is sleeve damage. Faster than light travel is performed using FTL communications to send a person's digitally stored brain where they are given a new body on arrival.

That makes for interesting science fiction. Of course, all those people died the moment their original biological brain was destroyed/wiped clean. The stacks would only be copies of their personalities.

[Kitsune]

That makes for interesting science fiction. Of course, all those people died the moment their original biological brain was destroyed/wiped clean. The stacks would only be copies of their personalities.

Are actually the same person who went to bed last night. Our own memories are constantly rewriting themselves inside of our brains already.

[Acidburns]

This is a debate that has come up a few times here. The idea that brain recording / transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine / trekporter processes produce the same person is very counter intuitive, and one that our language isn't quite equipped to deal with. What constitutes a person and what death is take on a very different meaning if we can record & copy the human mind. Copying a human mind into a much younger body and brain muddies the water further, it is much clearer if the copy is an exact duplicate. Changed hormones and brain chemistry would result in personality changes, but if we consider people with brain damage, memory loss and hormonal changes to still be the same person I think we can do so here also.

Akkleptos, what is it about the recording process that leads you to your conclusion?

Do you believe that in order to be considered the same person a consciousness must always reside on the same physical medium? Or do you object to the idea of interrupting consciousness by storing it?

There was an excellent discussion on this topic a while back.

Much of the cultural impact produced by introducing a brain recording / revival process would depend on the cost and availability of it. If it is expensive we would have (almost) immortal millionaires who would continue to gather personal wealth and knowledge. They would become very alien in comparison to the general population. Even if the process was affordable there would be mistrust and resentment at first towards the re-born. Many people would be skeptical as to whether it was the same person, and I wouldn't be surprised to see people being rejected by friends and family. Over time attitudes would change, perhaps quite quickly if there was significant adoption of the process; people are afraid of death, there would be little to lose, even if you consider the process to produce a different person.

Now that I think of it, it would be very similar to Peter F. Hamilton's "Misspent Youth", which you may have read Kitsune, except with some additional culture shock because people will be slower to accept that transferring memories to a new brain would result in the same person. If you concealed the details of the process, I think the (expected) outcome of the process in "Misspent Youth" would be the indistinguishable from your proposal. It also opens up some additional possibilities. Space travel would be much easier if the mind-transfer process is relatively simple. People could be stored and revived on arrival, or even transmitted via radio wave.

Without the ability to edit memories, or improve the human brain, there would have to be some sort of upper limit on how long someone could live before their brain becomes "full"? I don't know how a human brain would cope with memory over a very long lifespan. Would people forget unimportant or older memories and knowledge?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Of course the recording is you; there's no way to tell the difference between the two, is there? They're absolutely perfect recordings, thus the recording is absolutely, unquestionably you, containing all of the details of your brain that exist... At the exact instance of transfer. If the consciousness in your old body continues on, then there are two individuals based on the "you" which existed at that moment, both with a different set of probabilities for development and etc. The way to deal with this clearly is to just terminate the old copy because it's spawned its own further unique existence, meaning that we've captured a perfect freeze-frame of your existence and then re-initialized its continuing functioning and experiences without another equally valid "you" to muddle things up by laying claim to your relationships and property and so on. Obviously old people will just have to leave the instructions for this and then they'll have their old bodies eliminated during the process. Ideally, of course, we'd just run this copy on a much better mainframe, so that you end up becoming a very powerful CI (computational intelligence), with the necessary preparation for this being a course of increasing cybernetic enhancements over the time of your biological life which increase your parallel processing capacity in your body until you're already largely thinking as a machine as part of your natural development.

For those of us for whom upload technology will only be available at the very end of our possible biological lifespans, and I can only hope it will thus come soon enough for me, it will be a very jarring transition, at first, I admit, but then with effective immortality who really cares about how long you take to adapt to being a computer? Certainly any "body" I'd like to have at that point would be my own interstellar self-sustaining slowship, or at least one shared between me and my family, more precisely, all as computational intelligences. For later generations however, being a fleshy mortal human will just be the larval stage of your existence and it may well be ultimately someday regarded that your adulthood only comes about when you completely leave your cyborg body behind and become existant entirely as a CI.

[General Zod]

Of course the recording is you; there's no way to tell the difference between the two, is there? They're absolutely perfect recordings, thus the recording is absolutely, unquestionably you, containing all of the details of your brain that exist... At the exact instance of transfer. If the consciousness in your old body continues on, then there are two individuals based on the "you" which existed at that moment, both with a different set of probabilities for development and etc. The way to deal with this clearly is to just terminate the old copy because it's spawned its own further unique existence, meaning that we've captured a perfect freeze-frame of your existence and then re-initialized its continuing functioning and experiences without another equally valid "you" to muddle things up by laying claim to your relationships and property and so on. Obviously old people will just have to leave the instructions for this and then they'll have their old bodies eliminated during the process. Ideally, of course, we'd just run this copy on a much better mainframe, so that you end up becoming a very powerful CI (computational intelligence), with the necessary preparation for this being a course of increasing cybernetic enhancements over the time of your biological life which increase your parallel processing capacity in your body until you're already largely thinking as a machine as part of your natural development.

Isn't that just semantics? Regardless of other people's perceptions, the original entity ceases to exist on the moment of transfer. While things might be continuous from the clone's perspective, from the original's they just ended completely. It's like copying a CD. The disc might otherwise be completely indistinguishable from the original in every detail, but if the original were destroyed when it was transferred it's gone for good and the new disc would still just be a copy.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Isn't that just semantics? Regardless of other people's perceptions, the original entity ceases to exist on the moment of transfer. While things might be continuous from the clone's perspective, from the original's they just ended completely. It's like copying a CD. The disc might otherwise be completely indistinguishable from the original in every detail, but if the original were destroyed when it was transferred it's gone for good and the new disc would still just be a copy.

No. Because you're assuming there's some special existential quality to having your own body. There isn't, sorry. The original entity is a collection of thoughts, memories, experiences and behaviour patterns, insomuch as you are a sapient. The original's perspective is still the same--there is no clone, it's the same. There's no difference of perspective; you just go to sleep like for a normal surgical procedure and wake up as a computer. I'm surprised people here have such a difficulty grasping that. You're seeming to imply that there's some kind of quality in the physical materials which is uniquely relevant to sapience.. And there isn't. The genetic organism would certainly be different, since you're now a machine, but You are still going to be You.

Let's be blunt, the only way there could be a difference is if there's a soul, and we know souls don't exist, correct? How else could the "original" ever perceive it had ceased to exist? You can't perceive that! It is nonexistance and so no perception takes place.... One moment they put you under for the scan, the next moment you wake up from the sedative as a computer. It's that simple, there's no secret-special-soul-knowledge on the part of the "original" that it's now dead, there's no ability to perceive anything except from the perspective of the continued consciousness only. You seem to be implying there's something important to the data in the CD which is associated with the old CD case--there isn't. And there's nothing important about the data in the human brain associated with the body--there isn't. We just need the technological sophistication to emulate those functions and we're good to go.

[B5B7]

What's your current position now? Are you accepting flash-cloning as long as the original is frozen completely or the transfer is physically instantaneous (i.e. you've given up on your attachment to your current set of atoms)? Are you accepting a copy/destroy interval of a few milliseconds? Obviously you're not accepting intervals of seconds and above yet.

I'm glad you asked. My position is the same as always. I'm not accepting any of the mentioned methods as being true continuations of your life. It's just that you get an identical twin who happens to think he's you. You die (sorry, nth time it's been said, I know). As Samuel put it so succintly:

You're still dead- it is just a copy.

Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon is a great novel that explores the impacts of this kind of technology. In the novel human minds are downloadable into little memory "stacks" that are implanted in the spine. Bodies are referred to as sleeves and if I remember correctly a crime is only murder if they destroy the person's stack. Otherwise it is treated as a new category of crime which is sleeve damage. Faster than light travel is performed using FTL communications to send a person's digitally stored brain where they are given a new body on arrival.

That makes for interesting science fiction. Of course, all those people died the moment their original biological brain was destroyed/wiped clean. The stacks would only be copies of their personalities.

Then you must have died years ago - the brain you have now is not the brain you had as a baby. It consists of new matter as well as new neural connections, memories, etc.
Incidentally, I notice you have The Doctor as your avatar - when the Doctor regenerates is he still the Doctor?